


Asif the Stony-Hearted

by Fontainebleau



Category: Le città invisibili | Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-27 02:59:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17154020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fontainebleau/pseuds/Fontainebleau
Summary: Merchants venture wherever there is money to be made, but all go to Euphemia whose renown spreads far and wide; cargo boats wind upriver as caravans and wagons cross desert and lowlands to converge there at solstice and equinox. There we barter and trade, forge new acquaintances and remake old, strike hands on private arrangements that the farmers do not … well, no matter all that. And famously, when our business is done, we begin the exchange of memories.





	Asif the Stony-Hearted

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Melody_Jade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melody_Jade/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! I love _Invisible Cities_ , and your prompts were just too tempting to ignore; I hope you enjoy this.

In my city it is said that merchants have hearts of flint and souls as wizened as a coriander seed, and like all sayings there is much truth in it. In my dealings I am hard-hearted and unmovable; when I buy from the farmer with his harvest of apricots or mulberries I will offer not a copper more than I must, and when I sell I will have my coin even from the widow, though the children at her side are thin and hungry. In the bazaar they name me Asif the grasping, Asif the stony-hearted, and it is so: I must have my price. There is no other way.

To be apprenticed to a merchant is no mark of favour: most families would scorn to see a child so placed. Not mine. We were many, or at least I think we must have been so, a mob of children dirty and ill-dressed, fighting among ourselves for what little there was. Perhaps it was no more than hunger that drew me first to Jafar’s market stall where fragrant dates and persimmons lay piled beside dried cherries and sacks of pistachios: no doubt it was that way. Jafar had a hawk’s eye for his goods and a switch to whip at pilfering hands, but he liked to talk, sitting on his cushion with a bowl of jasmine tea at his side, story after story of his adventures and exploits, and for a boy with the patience to listen, well, in time there might be a sweetmeat or a handful of nuts to chew. 

Jafar was not of our city and to his face men called him Jafar the Levantine, but more often they named him Jafar the mad. I went often to sit at his stall and listen and though he told me much, little of it made sense: tales of journeys with this companion and that, of cities he had seen whose names I did not recognise, of disasters he had weathered in the desert or at sea with never a mark to show for it. He would ramble from one tale to the next, and some were unsuitable for a boy, of women he had known or entertainments he had seen where slaves were debauched for public show, but it was all one to him. His memory seemed a bag of fragments into which he would dip, never minding what he might draw out, and that not surprising.

Merchants venture wherever there is money to be made, but all go to Euphemia, whose renown spreads far and wide; cargo boats wind upriver as caravans and wagons cross desert and lowlands to converge there at solstice and equinox. There we barter and trade, forge new acquaintances and remake old, strike hands on private arrangements that the farmers do not … well, no matter all that. And famously, when our business is done, we begin the exchange of memories. 

It is not done randomly: where would be the virtue in that? It is a mark of status, a contest of a sort – he who prospers, who will leave Euphemia with a profit to weigh down his purse, must give in exchange at the fires a remembrance of worth – a triumph, an adventure, a night of passion or a moment of pleasure. And he who will depart with a purse thinner than before, when the words are thrown out across the flames – ‘knife’ or ‘peach-tree’ or ‘sailship’ – he may offer up a memory of which he would be rid, a defeat, a rejection, a failure. So the unsuccessful return to their daily lot lightened in more ways than one, and the wealthy leave freighted with sorrow as well as gold.

I do not recall what my father said when Jafar proposed that I become his apprentice, though I suppose he was glad to have one fewer mouth to feed, and I to leave. So I became Jafar’s boy, keeping the flies from his stall, running errands at his beck and call, tending the camels and listening to him talk, early and late. He was kindly, in a careless way, and I was not afraid to work: certainly I ate better than before and even grew a little, from a skinny boy to an awkward gangling youth. 

From time to time Jafar went away to trade about the country, and from the first I badgered to go with him, saying that I must learn more than haggling with old women in the bazaar, that I must learn to treat with the farmers up in the stony valleys and know the rivermen I could trust. At length Jafar saw the justice of my argument, or perhaps it was only that he thought I was old enough, and he began to take me with him to watch as he bargained. Everywhere was new to me then, even the farms with orchards stunted and poor, and the mean villages with flea-ridden beds and packs of feral dogs. I listened and learned as Jafar sat to drink mint tea and bargain; I saw how he called all _My friend_ , praising their cross-eyed daughters and meagre hospitality, and I saw too how little the words meant to him.

 

We went at autumn equinox to Euphemia when I was fifteen years old. Truth to tell, it did not seem much to me after all I had heard and it still does not, a plain flyblown city, small in the dusty landscape, its streets narrow, its mosque undecorated, the water of its river sluggish and green. Jafar exchanged our goods, the sacks of mulberries and apricots we had brought given for pistachios and oranges, but it was the evening afterward that set excitement fizzing like sherbet in my belly. 

Cross-legged at the fringe of the crowd around a fire I clutched the half-cup of well-watered wine I was permitted and looked from one face to another, old, young, bearded and smooth, pox-scarred or handsome. At length a dark-faced man pronounced solemnly, ‘Pitcher,’ and each man told a memory, Jafar among them. I leaned forward eagerly to hear, but the tales they told seemed mundane – reminiscences of an afternoon’s conversation or an argument at a well, a child’s prank or a mishap, and when the telling was done no man was any different, neither downcast nor euphoric. 

In the light of day I found it hard to credit what I believed I had witnessed: how could a handful of stories told around a fire change men’s memories? I was determined to put it to the test, so when we left Euphemia, the exchanges done, and began our journey homeward I waited as Jafar rattled on until there came a moment when I could ask, as though at random, ‘Was that not like the time in Zaira when you stole a pitcher from a rich man’s house and sold it back to him that same afternoon in the market?’ 

Jafar scowled, eying me suspiciously. ‘That was another’s tale,’ he said, ‘I claim no such thing.’ Plainly his recollection had been wiped away, as when a sponge is passed across a slate, and as he began to ramble again, prompted by the tale, I began to consider. 

My life had been short so far and my memories of childhood sorry things of poverty and violence which brought nothing for their recall but regret and shame. Might I be able to give my burden to others to carry, and take from them a remembrance of what I had not experienced? The idea rose within me like the flame of a candle newly-lit, and I determined that when I went again to Euphemia, I would make a trial. 

Half a year passed before we made the journey again, and though I was yet a boy at Jafar’s command I had some coin of my own at last. In a trading city there is never a shortage of wine-sellers and pleasure-houses; if I slipped away Jafar need think only that I sought to drink and gamble, or ventured more intimate company, though in truth the kohl-eyed women on their balconies terrified me to speechlessness. In the bazaar I bargained poorly, beggaring myself, then I took my place the most distant of the fires and for the first time I gave a memory of my past to the flames and received another, and saw the way that it could be. 

From that time every half-year we crossed the mountains and traversed the lowlands with their fields of snorting water-buffalo, and I would give to the fire a memory of my childhood. It became my passion: Euphemia was to me as a drug, like the dreaming poppy or the bubbling narghile. I told myself, I would not become as Jafar, his mind adrift and fragmented: I would take my memories and portion them out to exchange, patterning those I would receive into a new whole. And it was so: now when I look back to my childhood I remember brothers quick in my protection, a father stern but generous and a mother kind and loving, a grandmother who would give me cakes warm from the fire. Poverty and humiliation I gave to others to bear, weaving my own past from a patchwork of other’s tales, and I was the happier for it. 

I grew in those years, not in stature but in spirit: as I walked the winding streets of my own city I might see all men as my brothers, all women at the market my grandmother; I might pass by my own kin all unknowing, grudges forgotten. To earn the exchange I craved I must be the poorest of merchants, and so much the better for those I dealt with: Asif the generous, they began to name me, Asif the open-handed. Perhaps they would call me that still if I had not gone with Jafar to Ismara.

\--

Ismara is a river-town and the market there at that time new-grown; Jafar took us to trade for nothing more exotic than fennel-seed and preserved lemons, reminding me of his lifelong friendship with the lemon-seller, but beside its regular bazaar Ismara had attracted those who offered slaves for sale. These were not the brutal auctions of chain and block, but a more rarefied offering – at Ismara men could find men and women trained to their profession: musicians, scribes, acrobats, hairdressers for fashionable women and physicians for civic purchase.

Drawing water for the camels at the well I met by chance a girl, her robe plain and her two braids stiff with copper wire; she did not speak to me but she watched me from the corner of her eye as I did her, and there was a snap and sparkle in her dark gaze that caught me as in a net, though I could find no word to say. As she took away her pitcher she gave me one black dancing glance before she went in at a nearby gate; I was a man grown, and for the first time I had seen a woman I desired. 

Next day I found reason to loiter by the well until she came, and this time we spoke a few words: she told me her name, Hamida, and that she was a slave, intended to become a concubine to a wealthy man. I told her of myself and perhaps I boasted a little of how Jafar and I were partners in our trade, and of the places I had seen, though in truth most had been a long ride on camelback to stay outside the city walls. But I had brought a persimmon and we shared it, and when I said at the last that I hoped to see her again, she blushed and smiled.

On the way home I asked Jafar if he knew who owned the house where Hamida lived, and I described it, and despite myself the tale came out about the black-eyed girl too, but he only told me of a night he had spent with a trader woman from the north, red-haired and with tattoos on her arms, though whether the memory was his or another man’s or an invention of his own, I could not say.

At home I could think of nothing else but Hamida’s black eyes and gentle smile, chafing that I could not return to see her, but Jafar seemed determined to continue his acquaintance with the lemon-seller, and at the beginning of spring we went again to Ismara again. I had toiled in the meantime to make a little money to buy Hamida a gift, and when I sought her out, if she was pleased at the bracelet of bronze I gave her, she was pleased to see me too, none could mistake it. 

Bolder than before, I declared I would marry her if I could, but she told me solemnly she would make a poor wife. She had no skills to cook or bake, to sew or nurse a child: she had been taught only to be a pretty toy to entertain. No matter, I told her, if she would wait for me I would take her to my home as wife, but at that she became sad: her time would come soon to be sold, she said, and we might not meet again.

The thought was insupportable, and in that moment I determined that none should buy her save I. It was folly – I had no house to take her to, had I even the price to pay, and I could not keep a wife – Jafar, I knew, would ask me if the sun had turned my wits. Lying on my pallet at night I conceived plan after plan, all wild and impractical: I would take Hamida and we would run away, steal a boat and sail downriver, or flee into the mountains and find a hidden valley… I should have driven myself as mad as Jafar had not fate intervened. 

 

Sickness came to our city, the yellow plague that follows the summer dust and heat; the water in the wells was scant and bitter, and many succumbed. Among them was Jafar, who burned and struggled for seven days, growing weaker; I tended him as best I could, for he had no other, and when he died I made him a grave and a marker. Thus I became owner of the house and the stall, the camels and Jafar’s strongbox, and when all was set in order I rode again to Ismara with but one thought in my mind. 

Over tea with Hamida’s owner I thought to bargain keenly, but it seemed he saw through to the fire within me and divined that I would pay whatever price he named, and when we struck hands in agreement the sum left the strongbox empty. But it seemed of no consequence to me when I was able to take her hand, draw her veil aside and tell her, _I have bought you and I will set you free_.

When we returned together I showed Hamida the house and the stall, then I put in her hands the paper that made her free. I said, I would not force her, but it was my wish that we be wed, and she gave me her assent, her black eyes fierce and sparkling. I put the paper in the strongbox and never thought of it again, and on our wedding night I undid the twists of wire than confined her hair and spread it about her shoulders as we lay in love. 

Those were good years. I am no longer young and my mind full of other men’s pasts, but those years I set myself to preserve as though in amber. Happiness holds no interest to recount, perhaps, but I was happy: I had Hamida for whom I’d longed, in my house, singing as she drew the water, welcoming me when I came home at evening, and in my bed at night. In time she became a good wife to me, learning to cook and sew clothes, to keep house and nurse fevers; if I still profited little at business, what matter? Anything I made was for her: I bought her a bird in a cage to amuse her, plump dates to eat and a fine-weave shawl. After a year she gave me a child, and though I was anxious she came safely through it, the child a healthy girl I named Gabina. 

Euphemia I abandoned, thinking my business there done, but a merchant must travel at times: I went up to the farmers at harvest time, and once or twice along the river. I took an apprentice, the son of a man I called cousin and perhaps he was: the boy was quick with coin and measure, and kept the stall while I was away. 

I thought I had the measure of things: I thought what I knew was the truth. What follows is hard for me to write. Gabina means _honey_ and those years were sweet as honey, where now there is only gall. 

 

I had gone in autumn up into the mountains, a fortnight’s journey from farm to farm to buy their mulberry crop, but I did not worry to be away: Hamida I trusted with my whole heart. I had hastened my camels on the return, thinking to find as always a fire burning on the hearth, Hamida at her work and Gabina at play; but this time when I came home the house was shuttered and empty, the hearth cold and bare. Our neighbours did not know where my wife might be, and she had left no sign: at the sight of the house so neat and lifeless a cold trepidation seized me.

At the market I found the boy, pale and stammering in fear. I could not stop her, he said, she had broken the lock of the strongbox and had hit him when he tried to keep it from her, then she had taken Gabina and left: he did not know where she had gone. He shrank from me in expectation of a beating, but I was too confounded to think of him. 

I could not fathom it: where would Hamida go? She had no family, only I – had someone threatened? Visions of robbery, of kidnapping danced through my head, and the truth never crossed my mind, not for one moment. 

Only when I found the strongbox full as the day I left it, save only for the bond that granted her freedom; when I saw how carefully she had separated those things which were mine, down to the coins from her marketing, and those I had given her as gifts; when I saw the birdcage, door propped open, set upon the sill – then the picture stood before me, whole and impossible to mistake. 

Hamida had never loved me as I did her: it had been a shadow play, a road to a future I had never understood. Perhaps she had cared for me; perhaps she had been no more than grateful, but now, her lessons learnt, she had flown like the bird, slipping away unnoticed. I would not find her, and what would be the purpose: should I try to claim her again as my own to sing and flutter in a cage? 

 

My grief and shame was greater than I had ever known, greater than I could bear, and as I sat beside my cold hearth it came to me that I did not have to bear it. The memories of my happiness had turned to poison in my soul, and I knew a place where I could pluck them out one by one to ease its bite. It would not be cheap: Euphemia has its laws. I had given freely of sorrow and poverty at a small price, but to exchange the greatest happiness of my life I must needs be the most prosperous trader in that city of merchants. 

And so it is that I who was Asif the generous am become Asif the stony-hearted: every coin in my coffer is a promise of the balm of forgetting. None need look to me for kindness; I will have my price, and in five years, or ten, I will have smashed my life with Hamida to fragments and passed them out one by one, to traders honest and crooked, foolish and wise. 

Every man who passes through Euphemia will take a mirror fragment of her face bent over the cooking pot, of her song to our daughter, of the scent of sandalwood as she combed her hair or the black fleece of her loins in our bed. When I am done I will have forty other lovers to dance through my memory, dark and fair, old and young, heavy with childbearing or graceful and slender, and I will be happy again like crazy Jafar. I will buy my memories from Euphemia no matter what the cost. There is no other way.

 

 


End file.
